Anti-Seliger

Last summer, I reported from Seliger, the summer camp of the Russian nationalist youth group Nashi. Weeks of lakeside lectures, campfires, and visits to “breeding tents” mold the adolescent party faithful into year-round enforcers, debaters, and organizers of all manner of political activities. Last month, Nashi gathered fifty thousand young people at an anti-corruption rally in the capital.

Even if Nashi buses in young people from sleepy, blighted corners of the country and promises them a fun day in the capital, no opposition rally in the age of Putin has attracted even five thousand protesters, let alone fifty thousand. Nor do the many, fractious Russian opposition groups have a steady flow of capital from Mikhail Prokhorov and other businessmen trying to curry favor with the Kremlin. But, just the Tea Party has incorporated the methods of the community organizer Saul Alinsky, the Russian left now has its own summer camp: Anti-Seliger. The opposition camp may not be on an idyllic lake near Putin’s summer home, but it is nonetheless in a resonant site: the forest of Khimki, just north of Moscow.

In Soviet days, the Khimki forest was a federally protected reserve celebrated as Moscow’s “green lung.” In 2004, plans were unveiled for a new highway linking Moscow and St. Petersburg. It was a necessary improvement—one does not really exist now, which would be analogous to having no interstate between New York and Washington—but the planned road would cut right through the Khimki forest, instead of taking a shorter route around it. Ever since the plans were announced, Khimki has become a byword for protests and vicious retribution, such as the reprisal against the local journalist and Khimki activist Mikhail Beketov, who, as a result of a savage beating, has lost a leg, several fingers, part of his skull, and the ability to speak. In 2009 Vladimir Putin revoked federal protection for the Khimki forest, designating it an area fit for transport and industrial development. It later emerged that Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s childhood friend and judo partner, was building the road.

“People are either getting their heads beaten in or arrested, so I’m impressed that people came,” Yevgenia Chirikova told a gaggle of reporters gathered under Khimki’s birches on Saturday afternoon.

Chirikova, a local businesswoman who has been the Jane Jacobs of Khimki to Putin’s Robert Moses, has emerged as one of the most effective civic organizers in Russia. She has drawn international attention to the cause (Bono has been brought into the fray) and has had a temporary victory: last August, President Dmitry Medvedev put a halt to the razing of the forest. A few months later, however, a Kremlin-appointed expert panel ruled that there was no better alternative, and construction is underway again.

“We have eleven alternative plans,” Chirikova said at the press conference at Anti-Seliger. “Including one option that is shorter, cheaper, and cuts out the need for a bridge, which is a rather expensive luxury in Russia.” She added, “Lots of my friends have left Russia, and I could leave, too, but I don’t want to do it. I like it here! And I believe that, with a bit of time, life in Russia will be no worse than in other countries.”

Behind Chirikova, on the stage, a band was playing. People lolled around on the grass near their tents. Others clustered around the employees of the anti-corruption blogger Alexey Navalny, whom I profiled in April. (The anti-corruption rally in the capital was Nashi’s attempt to co-opt his campaign.) Another group was following Navalny himself, who had come to offer support for Chirikova and the project.

“I’ve been communicating with thousands of people through my blog, but I’ve never seen them,” Navalny explained later. “It feels like old friends you haven’t seen for years, so people just want to come and say hi. It’s natural.” The old friends, however, quickly proved trying. “Why don’t we talk after my lecture,” Navalny said rather curtly to one supporter, “instead of asking the same question over and over again?”

Navalny was the biggest star at Anti-Seliger, but the camp on Saturday was a who’s who of the Russian opposition. Elena Panfilova, the gregarious, silver-tongued head of the Russian wing of Transparency International, was there with a plastic bag of apricots, as was Anton Nossik, a pioneer of the Russian Web and a trustee of Navalny’s project RosPil, which monitors abuse in government requests for tender. Roman Dobrokhotov, a young journalist and activist, pestered Navalny on his politics during the question period. Alexander Belov, the leader of DPNI, a banned nationalist party, got a shout-out in Navalny’s answer. Sergei Kalenik, the young man behind the Super Putin comic strip, came with his fiancée. Yabloko, which, until it was squeezed out by Putin’s power vertical, represented Russian liberals in parliament, provided the food: canned meat stew over kasha, cooked in olive-green vats of massive mobile army field stoves from Brezhnev’s day. Sergei Udaltsov, the leader of Left Front, was there, as were representatives from the National Bolshevik Party (which is headed by the writer and perpetual provocateur Eduard Limonov), the Sakharov movement, and the increasingly popular Federation of Russian Automobile Owners (FAR).

“Of course, as drivers, we say, ‘I wish they’d build the road already!’ ” FAR leader Sergei Kanaev told me, squinting in the late afternoon sun. “But this is an opportunity to put our civil society on display, to come together. The Kremlin is only happy when fight each other,” he said. “This is not an anti-road gathering; it’s anti-Seliger.”

Kanaev was absolutely right: no one could confuse this event, which attracted three thousand Russians over the course of four days, with Seliger. Last year, Medvedev helicoptered into Seliger as a surprise and danced in the rain. Anti-Seliger’s surprise guest was Sergei Mironov, the deposed speaker of the rubber-stamp Russian Senate and until recently the head of A Just Russia, an “opposition” party created by the Kremlin. There was no rain, and Mironov did not dance. Instead, he stopped a bulldozer pushing around tree trunks without a permit, and, in his stroll through the forest, took a picture of the stump of a recently cut hundred-and-fifty-year-old tree. Nashi, he said on his way out of the campsite, is “a modern version of the Red Guards”—the youth groups that did the dirty work of the Chinese Cultural Revolution—“with all the consequences that implies.” Quite a platitude from a man whose job is to criticize the Kremlin, which gives him that job.

And where Seliger had intensive techno-pop aerobics workouts, Anti-Seliger had Pavel Boloyangov, a world champion mixed-martial-arts fighter, who gave a master class in self-defense—a necessary skill for activists and journalists whose colleagues have been beaten or killed for their work. In a clearing surrounded by a few dozen onlookers and about as many photographers, Boloyangov demonstrated how to wrestle out of a headlock, how to deliver an effective crotch hit. His sparring partner was none other than Navalny, who is now being investigated on federal charges, and is the subject of constant speculation: is he next?

Anti-Seliger may have been chaotic, but it was cheerful—and constructive for a movement that, as Chirikova puts it, is like an infant who has nearly been strangled in its cradle. Still, as I stood in Khimki forest recording Boloyangov and Navalny’s tussle, I felt like I might be creating some dark souvenir for the future.

Julia Ioffe has written about Russia for many publications, including The New Yorker, where she published a profile of Alexey Navalny.